Do you have all the makings of a textile artist inside of you, just itching to get out? Maybe you've always wanted to learn how to sew your own clothes or curtains and quilts to dress up your home, but the thought just seems intimidating? Well, today's featured artists, mother and daughter team Marguerita McManus and Sarah Raffuse, offer up advice to novice sewers and make it easy to begin creating your own modern quilts that will perfectly match you decor. One day it's quilts, and the next it's Project Runway here you come!

Tell us a little about yourself and your work. The main focus of our Etsy shop is to sell items related to the quilt book my daughter and I wrote together called Crazy Shortcut Quilts. The book was published in 2007 by Krause Publications and is in its second printing!

One of the reasons that our book is so popular is that the foundation of our advice for the quiltmakers is to make fabric selections that match your home decor. Ours is not a "perfectly precise piecing" book because neither of us is that fussy! Rather, we love teaching sewers our sloppy way of making crazy looking (as in 'crazy quilt looking') quilts without having to spend their lives matching points and squaring up blocks. Most of all though, our students *love* that they get to use the decorative stitches of their sewing machine to do the quilting -- in small manageable squares. In the technical terms of quiltmaking it's called "quilt-as-you-go" and ours is the easiest method on the market today. We often hear back from women who make 3 to 5 quilts a year using our methods.

How did you get started as a designer? Marguerita (the mom) got started quilting in 1995 and became a teacher and longarm quilter and Sarah (the daughter) was tricked into learning to quilt. We both love teaching quilting and take every opportunity to do demonstrations, classes and retreats.

Who are your favorite designers? We love Eleanor Burns! We also love many fabric designers and Sarah is particularly fond of Holly Holderman's fabric company, Lakehouse.

What are your top fashion & beauty must-haves? For us a "must have" is a sewing machine with lots of decorative stitches. While we can easily quilt with machines that have just a few, varying the stitch width and length, we just love machines with 100 or more stitches.

Any advice you would give to aspiring quilt designers? Marguerita loves to help new quilt designers and her best advice is to find quiet time to let loose the creativity and inspiration inside and then write specific goals and deadlines for each step of bringing your art to the public.

Where can people find your work? We have a website at www.crazyshortcuts.com and we both blog - Marguerita just moved to Wordpress and is at marguerita.loosefibers.com and Sarah is at sarahraffuse.blogspot.com

We opened up our Etsy shop to sell some quilts, autographed books, new designs for our Crazy Shortcut method and occasionally a few fabric bundles. We have photos of some of the quilts from the book on Flickr here. Marguerita has a demo of the shortcut techniques on YouTube here.


We love all of the amazing independent designers out there and we wanted to find out more about what makes these creative types tick. If you do too, check out more of our Indie Designer Interviews.